Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

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512 STEPHEN NEALE philosophy and linguistics when it is not seen as comprising two utterly distinct theories. It is at least arguable that the "Theory of Conversation" is a component of the "Theory of Meaning". And even if this interpretation is resisted, it is undeniable that the theories are mutually illuminating and supportive, and that they are of more philosophical, linguistic, and historical interest if the temptation is resisted to discuss them in isolation from one another. To a large extent, this conviction will shape the entire discussion. 1. MEANING AND USE As far as contemporary work in the philosophy of language is concerned, it is common to see Grice's attempts to distinguish between semantic and pragmatic implications as his major contribution. But it should not be overlooked that Grice's own interest in natural language was not confined to the delimitation and systematization of genuinely semantic facts. Grice felt that a number of promising approaches to important philosophical problems had been written off rather unfairly as a result of unsound linguistic maneuvers executed by philosophers impressed by the nuances of ordinary language. 5 It is important for a proper understanding of Grice's work to get a sense of the sorts of problems he was up against and a sense of his own curious position with respect to the movement often called "Ordinary Language Philosophy". For Grice was at once an accomplished practitioner and the most resourceful critic of this style of philosophizing. Under the influence of Wittgenstein, the view that the only useful thing to say about the meaning of an expression is that it is used in such-andsuch a way, or is usable in such-and-such circumstances, came to exercise a powerful influence on philosophy as practiced in postwar Oxford. It was common for Austin, Ryle, and others to undercut a philosophical position or dispose of a philosophical problem by pointing to a misuse of some expression playing an essential r61e in the presentation of the position or problem. This was often done by highlighting some characteristic feature of the use of the expression in question, and then demonstrating that the statement of the position or problem in question was, or required being, insensitive to this feature. Two simple examples will set the scene. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle says that In their most ordinary employment 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' are used, with a few minor elasticities, as adjectives applying to actions which ought not to be done. We discuss whether someone's action was voluntary or not only when the action seems to have been his fault. (p. 69) 5 In a similar vein, see also Searle (1969).
PAUL GRICE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 513 And it is only because philosophers have been prone to misuses of the expression "voluntary", extending it to actions where there is no question of fault, says Ryle, that they have so easily come up with the traditional problem of free will. If philosophers were to guard against such unwarranted departures from ordinary usage, they would find it difficult to formulate a genuine philosophical problem here. A second example concerns any attempt to provide analyses of knowledge in terms of belief along the following lines: A knows that p if and only if (i) A believes that p, (ii) p, and (iii) A is justified in believing that p. To this suggestion it might be charged that it is a feature of the use of the verb 'believe' that one does not use it if one can sincerely use the verb 'know' in its stead. Such a claim might be backed up by appealing to the observation that it would be quite inappropriate for A to say "I believe that my wife is ill" when A knows that his wife is ill. And so it might be concluded that the proposed analysis must be discarded because clause (i) does such violence to the ordinary use of the verb 'believe'. 6 Out of this general concern for the nuances of ordinary talk, there emerged in Oxford a reaction to the view that expressions of natural language have an exact semantics that can be captured using the devices of classical logic. The revolt began officially in 1950 with the publication in Mind of Strawson's "On Referring", essentially a full-scale attack on Russell's Theory of Descriptions. According to Russell, the proposition expressed by a sentence of the form ~the F is G ~ is the general (quantificational) proposition that there is exactly one F and every F is G. As such, the proposition has one of the standard truth values and can be completely characterized using quantifier-variable notation: (3x)((Vy)(Fy =- y = x) & Gx). Strawson argued against Russell's theory on the grounds that it (a) fails to do justice to the way speakers ordinarily use sentences containing descriptive phrases to make statements and (b) rides roughshod over important distinctions (such as the distinction between the meaning of a sentence 4) and the statement made by a particular use of ~b). It is a part of the meaning of rthe F 7, Strawson originally claimed, that such an expression is used correctly only if there is an F. If this condition is not satisfied (if the "presupposition" that there is an F is false, as he was later to put it), a use of e.g., rthe F is G 7 cannot be considered to express a 6 Grice provides further examples in Essays 1 and 15.
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